The much-acclaimed documentary, The Language You Cry In (1998), is the story of “how memory of a family was pieced together through a song with legendary powers to connect those who sang it with their roots”. It is the story of an Afro-American, Mary Moran, whose return to her roots in Sierra Leone, was a result of a lengthy anthropological research by many generations of scholars on a very old song that her mother, Amelia Dawley, use to sing. The search for matches for that song eventually brought the successful discovery of a dirge used to mourn the dead that was sung amongst the Mendes in southern Sierra Leone. A song that was ritually sang at the graveside to accompany the dead who cross the threshold: “Tejamei”.
The “non story” of millions
It was in the process of this research that they came across a song sang by a lady called Amelia Dawley. It was characteristically the longest text of a song in an African language that was discovered in America without having a clue what the song meant or what its origins
Lorenzo Turner’s publication: Africanism in the Gullah dialect (1931) translated Amelia Dawley’s song, accounting for it as a dirge amongst the Mendes of Sierra Leone. Some words and ideophones had changed with time. For example the ideophone Tambe had changed to Kambei in the current use of the language. That publication was the highest Lorenzo did in his research of piecing together the past of African